The Cartesian Coordinate Plane

Last school year I was completely unaware of how important movement and space can be when creating a lesson or setting up a classroom. This time around, I'll look for windows of opportunity where I can have students move and learn at the same time.

I have finally finished creating an actual coordinate plane that the students can use to act out finding/graphing ordered pairs. I learned how to make this from a PD given by some speakers from the New York City Mathematics Project (NYCMP) I attended at the Frederick Douglass Academy in the city. I have been working on this for 3 days. I highly recommend creating this with someone, as creating it alone is quite tedious and takes lots of time.

I used duct tape and a shower curtain. Using simple colors (i.e. black) is also a great idea, as I spent half of the weekend running around to find the same lime green duct tape I used to create the first set of grid lines (after I ran out..). The "squares" are 4.5 x 5 inches. I hope the kids will be excited to use it!